CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

Interview by Jason Gross (March 1998)

Where hip-hop artists revolutionized what was possible
as a disk jockey, Christian Marclay upped the ante with making the turntable
into a legitimiate instrument itself. Since the late '70's, in performances,
recordings, installations and exhibtions at clubs, concert halls, galleries
and museums around the world, Marclay has taken the stereo components that
we take for granted and made them into expressive tools. Creating a dizzying
array of sound collages with dozens of records at a time, with no steady,
reassuring beat to go along with it, he makes and remakes the sounds from
all kinds of sources something much different from their original intention.
If there's a way to scratch, break, bend, warp or reconstruct a record,
Marclay knows how to do it.

One important point here- it's not just the
WAY that he uses records and turntables that is astonishing because his
sound sculputures themsevles are provactive, funny, challenging and inventive.
Two new CD's from Marclay will be coming out later this year on Asphodel.

PSF: You started working with records/turntables
as instruments in college. How did that start?

CM: I was a student at the Massachusetts College
of Art in Boston and I was interested in performance art and punk rock.
I was interested in what artists like Vito Acconci or Joseph Beuys were
doing with performance and I was also very interested in the energy of
punk rock. For me there was an interesting relation between the two. Being
in art school and wanting to make music was not an obvious choice but I
felt a lot more energy coming out of the music world than from the art
world. When I was visiting New York on the weekends, I tended to gravitate
more towards what was happening in music clubs than towards what was happening
in museums and galleries.

I came to New York in '78 on an exchange program
at Cooper Union, and when I went back to Boston I started performing as
a duo with guitarist Kurt Henry. I didn't have an instrument so I sang
and made these background tapes for the performances. We didn't have a
drummer so that's why I started using skipping records and things like
that, to produce these rhythm tracks that we'd perform along with. We also
used film loops from cartoons and sex films as audio-visual rhythm tracks.
It was as much performance art as it was music. In 1980 I organized a festival
(Eventworks), to explore the relation and influence of rock music on the
art world. I invited people like DNA, Rhys Chatham and Karole Armitage,
Dan Graham, Johanna Went, Boyd Rice, Zev to Boston. I showed films by Eric
Mitchell, Jack Smith, Vivienne Dick, and others.

PSF: How did you pick out which records would be
used?

CM: They were just thrift store records --I
never spent more than a dollar on a record. It was just junk, and I would
stick things on them to make them loop. I even used an old wind-up gramophone
that I found in the garbage. It was also at MassArt that I found these
great turntables (Califone) that I've been using ever since. They used
to be in every school's audio-visual department for instructional presentations.

PSF: Do you think of recontextualization with your
work?

CM: Sometimes people will hear something, and
they'll ask 'did you play this' when I actually didn't. It's interesting
that audiences have this need to identify the source material. Once different
unrelated records are combined, they sometimes have the power to trigger
the memory of a tune. I don't consciously make music to trigger memory
but it happens naturally. Music has such powers in triggering memory, collective
memory and private memory. What I consciously try to do is to use the widest
variety of music. These records often have different sets of references
for different people, because most memories are personal and subjective.
Whatever happens in their mind is something that I can't control, I can't
control what they think about what I'm doing. It's like silent audience
participation.

PSF: A lot of your work has involved the destruction
of records. What was your idea behind that?

CM: I realized that when I listened to a record,
there were all these unwanted sounds, clicks and pops, because of the deterioration
of the record, the surface noise, scratches. Instead of rejecting these
residual sounds, I've tried to use them, bringing them to the foreground
to make people aware that they're listening to a recording and not live
music. These sounds make people aware of the medium, of the vinyl, a cheap
slab of plastic. It's something so important because it's the way that
we relate to music most of the time, through recordings. We usually make
abstractions of the medium. For me, it was important to have this awareness
and underline it, to give it a voice. It has an expressive power in itself.
When something goes wrong, like when the needle skips, something unpredictable
happens, that wasn't the intention of the recording artist. In that incident,
something new and exciting happens. For me, it has creative potential.

PSF: That makes me think of a quote I heard where
someone at a concert said 'you know, this almost sounds as good as the
CD.

CM: Because people hear music mostly through
recordings, the recording becomes the reference, the template. Musicians
try to reproduce their CD's on stage, the audience already knows the music
through the recording and that's what they are expecting to hear.

What happens on the stage is not necessarily
what I want to happen on the CD. That's why there's so few live recordings
of my work. Your concentration and your attention are so different when
you're listening to a recording at home, where you can play the same piece
over and over and stop it at any time you want or be lying down in bed.
It's a totally different experience. When I listen to live recordings of
my performances, I become very critical, a recording is not a live concert,
it requires a different listening, and it changes with multiple plays.
When you're performing live, you're really responding to the moment. A
section may feel good live, but as a recording it drags, it doesn't have
the same intensity it did when you were present because you're missing
the visual, the process.

In my work the process is very important, to be able
to see it and hear it. I'm using these records and you can see how I manipulate
them and abuse them. Everything, the pace that the records get changed,
how long they stay on the turntables, what kind of shape they're in, the
manipulations, etc. All these actions inform the listening. I use the recording
studio very differently. When you're not on stage, you can go back and
try again and edit. The studio is another instrument. I don't want the
listener to forget it is a recording. That's why when I made Record Without
A Cover I made sure that when you put it down on your turntable, you wouldn't
forget that you're listening to a record.

PSF: Have you thought of working with CD's in similar
ways that you've worked with records?

CM: The CD's are part of a different technology.
They're not as simple and mechanical as records and turntables. I tried
fooling around with CD players but only in the recording studio. You can
get them to stay in a skip mode and gradually slide through a song. That
offers possibilities. Whatever the machine can do, except play the piece
from beginning to end, whatever you can do to make it sound different is
potentially interesting. There are people out there experimenting like
Yasunao Tone who's been doing things with skipping CD's for a long time.
But you can't physically scratch a CD or cut it in half and expect the
machine to still play it. And performing with a CD on-stage is not very
exciting visually.

PSF: You've talked about shows you had in the '80's
where you performed with hip-hop DJ's. How do you compare their work to
yours?

CM: They were doing dance music - that's the
major difference. I've never tried to do dance music. The similarity is
that we used records as instruments to create new music out of old music.
The great thing about hip-hop is that it really made DJ'ing more of an
accepted craft. MTV also helped in giving the scratched sound a gesture,
showing the hand of the DJ back spinning, it became such a cool gesture
and now everybody wants to scratch. I see kids now air-scratching while
walking around with their walkman. That sound and the way it was used in
hip-hop, scratching a beat and hearing the record go back and forth has
become so natural in the pop music landscape. Now it's a staple sample
on most keyboards. It's a normal sound now, but it was a revolutionary
sound in the 80's --it really made the use of found sounds acceptable in
pop music. Since the invention of records, experimental musicians have
explored the field, such as Musique Concrete in the 50's. Before the tape
recorder, everything was recorded on disc so people thought of ways to
use these recordings to make music. It's so obvious. You have a recording
and you play it at a slower speed and you get something new. So why not
just use it?

As you were mentioning in the '80's, there
were no collaborations --I was just a young marginal artist doing my thing.
I had no power. I tried to get in touch with those DJ's but it was very
hard. They wanted to make hit records. I just wanted to make challenging
music and have fun. I was interested in things that had no commercial value
at the time, so why try to convince people that listening to a lot of noise
can be fun?

PSF: You've said 'thrift stores are a better place
to find music than a record shop.' What did you mean there?

CM: It was part of a financial situation. I
could only afford records in thrift stores. Then you could find wonderful
things, but now everything is a collectible. I like the recycling idea
--using the stuff that people don't want anymore, and make new music out
of it. There was an element of looking back and listening to your parents'
records and doing something with that stuff. Sort of acknowledging the
past while rejecting it at the same time.

PSF: You've done some museum/gallery installations.
You were talking about the differences between a studio recording and live
shows so what about installations? How do you see that medium?

CM: Unfortunately, one of the big differences
is the audience. I've always tried to break down these divisions. Some
people just listen to music others just look at art, some do both but they
don't do it in the same place. It's sad that a lot of people can't be open-minded
enough to be curious about something they don't understand. Making exhibitions
that focus on sound in a visual art context is interesting to me. Having
an interest in both worlds it was natural for me to bring them together.
Everybody experiences music one way or another, music is usually more democratic
than art, so I feel I can touch more people with it, even if I make a piece
that doesn't make any sound, but deal with notions of perception of sound.
We take a lot of our sound experiences for granted. We don't question sounds
as much as images.

PSF: With turntable musicians and DJ's, do you think
that the style has evolved enough to produce a musical equivalent of a
Jimi Hendrix or a John Coltrane?

CM: If the turntable is a legitimate musical
instrument, then some people are going to push the boundaries and see how
far you can go with this instrument. I don't think I've seen a Jimi Hendrix
of the turntable. But there's so much more going on now. When I started
using records, hip-hop was just being born, and now everybody wants to
be a DJ. Still, most DJ's do very commercial work. But a lot of them are
really pushing the envelope and stretching the notion of the DJ and with
interesting results.

PSF: Anyone in mind when you say that?

CM: Otomo Yoshihide
is someone I'm working with right now on a collaboration for Asphodel.
He's an interesting DJ and really knows how to improvise with the records.
He has great energy. Then there is the New York illbient scene with DJs
like Olive, The Audio Janitor, and Toshio Kajiwara. They're always telling
me about other kids doing interesting things and I'm just discovering new
things through them. I've collaborated with Toshio and Olive in group improvisations.
The other project I'm releasing with Asphodel is a compilation of live
recordings that I've done over the last year with some of these younger
DJ's. These are live performances. It's not a solo project -- when you
think DJs, you think of them as solo artists with big egos. But if the
turntable is really an instrument then why not have a band and play the
instrument in combination with others. To react to sounds that don't come
out of your own records, that's the ultimate challenge for a DJ. I've been
trying for many years now to push this notion of the DJ as a band member,
and I have been interested in groups of DJ's improvising together like
a jazz band. So this record will be really featuring the instrument as
a collaborative tool. It's hard to tell who's doing what when you're listening
to these recordings. There's certain stylistics particular to each DJ,
but when you hear a skipping loop, you think 'who's doing it' but who cares
really? The result is a real collaborative effort and you have to listen
to all these sounds democratically.

PSF: What do you think of other people who are other
deconstructionists, like Negativland and John Oswald?

CM: They both do great work. I remember touring
in 1980 in San Francisco when I found out about Negativland. They had just
released their first LP with hand made covers, each cover was a different
collage. What amazes me is how this kind of home-grown stuff, which was
so marginal, so anarchic at the time, has been able to create such a following.
It's interesting that you mentioned these two names because they both managed
to get sued. It's probably why they've gotten famous. So its seems that
to be famous you either have to make pop music or get sued by pop music.
It's great work because it doesn't fit into any clean little box and it's
very political. They are critical of the music industry but they're also
totally dependent on these machines that the industry puts out like samplers
and tape recorders. There's a contradiction between what's out there --available
machines to record and remix-- and the legal system. I don't have a clear
answer to the copyright issue but there's this huge contradiction between
what artists are doing and what the law wants to set up. Sony corporation
makes the machines but they'll sue you for using them. John Oswald and
Negativland's work is essential. They're true artists in the sense that
they've really created something original and very potent and in touch
with what's out there. They're not just entertainers, they make us think.

PSF: What did you think of this interest in DJ's
happening with techno now?

CM: When I heard of these new DJ's, I just
felt like 'what's going on, I thought vinyl was dead?'. What's so hip and
sexy about scratching record? I always thought it was a little nerdy. It
didn't seem like this whole illbient and techno crowd could generate so
much interest. But there's something about scratching a record that has
become so glamorized, so photogenic that it's a cool thing to do. Maybe
'cool' is really the word because it's so detached and so distant in relation
to live music, have you ever seen a DJ sweat? I was the first one shocked
to see all these kids doing it. But the wonderful thing is that suddenly
I have colleagues to play with and a new audience.

PSF: What kind of advice would you give to someone
thinking of using a turntable as an instrument?